ConEd and GHI insurance bully customers into paying on time, threatening cancellation, even if they pay they bills punctually, rants PR and blogging maven B.L. Ochman.

"I pay my bills on time. Yet last night, my Con Ed bill included a dire notice that my electricity was about to be disconnected. For the past four months, my health insurance bill has included a notice to cancel IF I don't pay on time...I called Con Ed and was told that it was a mistake and to disregard it. I asked the rep how to prevent this "mistake" from happening again and she said "people make mistakes, there really is no way to prevent it from happening again." <snip> I wrote a letter to the president of the [health insurance company]. He told me the threatening notices are sent to all customers at the request of GHI and that "good customers like you who pay on time can simply disregard the notice." NO! Wrong!"

Rather than “mistakes” B.L. supposes this is actually a new trend in customer intimidation. While it’s certainly bad policy, this bullish position is more bluster than bust. The cost for a company to acquire a new customer is far greater than squeezing extra dollars out of existing ones or the “indignation” of providing service to unpunctual payers.

How treating one’s customers with universal contempt pays off is beyond us. The secrets are probably divulged in one of those senior year MBA courses at Stanford Graduate Business School.

Once we were in a spot of debt with American Express. We received a call from an outsourced Indian debt collector sounding like they were accusing us of ebaying the vital organs of their eldest man-child. After resolving the issue some time later can you guess where we’ll never seek credit again?

Simply put, companies, can you please be nicer? We want to give you good money for good products but not if you’re going to be a jerk!

On February 4, George Georgettis, an apparently mild-mannered performance arts theater manager, purchased a new SUV from a Miami Ford dealership. When he arrived home and checked the paperwork, he discovered the price was vastly higher than he agreed to on the lot. Feeling scammed, he took action. But rather than quietly seethe, blog about it or even complain to the Better Business Bureau, he crashed his new Ford Escape through the dealership's window, doused the SUV in gasoline and lit a match.

Witness "Denise Cruz was in line at the body shop, and was standing near Georgettis when he lit the match. “And the next thing you heard was BOOM, and you saw flames all over the place,” reported CBS-4.

Eleven cars were destroyed in the conflagration, including an extra-special 'limited-edition' Ford GT worth $150,000.

This otherwise darkly comic tale of vigilante consumer activism turned tragic last night when the suspect allegedly committed suicide, hanging himself in the restroom of a flight from Washington to LA.

Adverblog: "In Germany, BMW has been trying to artificially boost the popularity
ranking of its site. The mighty Google found out the automaker was
cheating and apparently kicked it out of its index. As reported on [other blogs, notably outer court]
BMW has been caught employing doorway pages to attract search engines
spiders. While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news
broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was
too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google
death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and
a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value."

Don't you people get it? It's not 1999 anymore. All you have to do is have lots of great, relevant content and you'll get search engine hits. Want a better ranking? Make a better site.

Contextual advertising fugdgeups happen in paper media too. German newspaper Landeszeitung Luneburg ran an article on the 61st anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Right next to it was an ad for a German energy company with the headline, “E.ON provides today for the gas of tomorrow.” [Apt via Consumerist via Backspace via Ishbadiddle via Stay Free!]

So Bucky Turco, the Man behind Animal magazine, and I were
chitchatting back and forth and he wanted to know what I would think if
I
received the evite below from Coltrane Curtis, who is, as I later learn , the MTV Fashion VJ (bitchy critque follows the primary source
doc). UPDATE: The evite's writer retorts in the comments. Word up.

-----NEW YORK IS NO LONGER WACK ON THE WEEKENDS.... This is for all who will be in NY this
weekend, and not dodging du-rags, chicken heads and bullets in Detroit.

Voltron is forming... With 2 weeks under our belt, this GET
FRESH FRIDAY is really a good look. Pretty faces, industry heavy-hitters,
eclectically sexy professional women, good looking well-dressed eligible men
(pause) and great sounds (Soul)...!

The shit that I really love, is that folks were dressed,
looking good. LOOKING DAMN GOOD....! Sneakers, frames, heels, good denim,
handbags, watches, were all in the building. We got started a lil late, like
11:30, but we rocked till my NewEra and Scott Langton shit got sweated thru
(Shameless plug....!)

Pretty design on the flyer but who the fuck is this funny
fat kid? Most importantly, what kind of music is playing? It takes me a while
to figure out its Soul. That should be pretty high up there not all this other
hootenanny and oh by the way we’re playing Soul. I would think why does this
dude spend so much time talking about how good looking the party is? When I
party, I want the music to be good, the drinks to be cheap and the people cool,
not some fashionista “heavy hitter” scene. And then I would check out his email
addresses realize this is MTV’s Fashion VJ and so that’s his whole thing and I
would be like, oh ok this is kind of funny then. But his websites are shallow
so he gets points off. And I would think it’s silly to use “W3” as your
shorthand for world wide web. The title of your attachment is another branding
opportunity, don’t waste it. And spending half your evite on shoutouts is lame.
As is having a confidentiality notice. And I don’t give a whoop that you were
sponsored by Bombay Sapphire, don’t put them in caps.

So overall, unless I knew the people throwing it or
otherwise had a really good reason, I wouldn’t attend.

ANIMAL: You're good.

I was kind of feeling the same way.

This mentioning of the clothes etc is what bothered me the
most. And of course, it being way too fucking long. I kept thinking, can't this
kid cut this banter down to 2 sentences?

SPUNKER:Yeah it’s like “First we looked good. Then lightened up
after having enough sponsored drinks. Then we had some fun and got stinky in
our good looking clothing. But first and foremost, we were good looking.” The
*list* of accessories is pretty classic. Shit man, look at all these words you
made me write. I should niptuck this whole thing into a blog entry.

ANIMAL:Yes you should, laf.
(that may have been the point, I don't know myself, but sometimes I can be
sneaky like that).

SPUNKER:Yeah aren’t you involved in the promo juice behind this? I
thought I remembered coming across something like before.

ANIMAL: Fuck no. Please. Ugg. I should burn your email for even
suggesting.

SPUNKER: Good. I’ll take my lighter away from the little framed
certificate on the wall that says “respect for Bucky” as well then.

ANIMAL:

No way. Ok. If you keep up the certificate I will forget your
insinuation of me being behind such a terrible event, laf.

Neil French composed a full reply, finally, to October’s sexist comment scandal. It’s awesome and done up in his
classic copywriting style and will be published in the Trade Press. He retrenches, but he’s definitely chastened and
even apologizes, but not for what you think. You get to learn a new word, anoraked, meaning “hooded,” as in “those
dastardly cloaked bloggers.” Good for him for making a full response but demerits for waiting and seeing how it played out before doing so. Truly revealing, however, is the intro prefacing the ad on his site...word to Mr. French, they're called it's femi-nazis, not feminist nazis... via. archival version.

They're not geniuses. Apple/TBWA messed up again. The blatant ripoff of the Postal Service's video was unauthorized and the band was completely unaware and did not receive compensation. Adrants points us to Adpulp pointing to a statement by band member Ben Gibbard on the Postal Service's website: "It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers' new
television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot
recreation of our video for 'Such Great Heights' made by the same
filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this
commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that
this was executed without our consultation or consent." This isn't just indie bitching. The band and the label had to pay for the video. They spent months concepting and producting i, only to have it co-opted by a major corporation. As revealed by the many comments on this issue, some people assumed that it was the result of some backend cross-promo deal between the Postal Service and Apple, an assumption potentially damaging to the Postal Service's rep. Any way you slice it, it's underhanded. Any way you slice it, it's created brand confusion, as Adreak notes, "More than 100 people have reviewed the video on iTunes, but a number of
them seem to be confusing the ad and the video, leading one exasperated
visitor to write: “Reading some of these reviews wants to make me punch
myself in the face. ‘Making computers’??? Where in this video do they
make ONE single computer? … Most of you need to stop writing reviews
and start blogs instead.” No statement has been forthcoming from Apple or TBWA. We demand answers. Though, perhaps the answer is that TBWA is just a big piarate ship. An Adpulp commentor notes, "...Chiat has always been masters at hacking the obscure. Remember the Taco
Bell Chihuahua law suit? Or "The Stuff of Life" campaign for Kmart?
(Actually you wouldn't remember that because it was ripped straight out
of a student portfolio and when the school threatened to sue Chiat,
Chiat threatened to blackball every student graduating from that
school)." Bad ass pirate ship or ship of fools? The market will decide.

UPDATE: (via) Josh Melnick and Xander Charity directed both videos. "However, Sarah Moody of Sub Pop Records, The Postal Service's Seattle record company, writes:
"... the Apple commercial is indeed very similar, it
wasn't licensed in any form, and was made by the same directors as the
Postal Service video. We weren't alerted to the fact that it existed
until the day it came out."...Apple's ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, didn't respond to a request for comment." But they will have to soon!